The Wolf In The Wall
by Lisbet Adair
Summary: Dr Anastacia Wolf's teetering on the brink of career collapse: accused by the CIA of treachery, she's been officially offered a lifeline by General Shepherd to teach the 141 how to crack the gulag, or so it appears...
1. Chapter 1

**Chapter One**

[This story takes place between the events of _Cliffhanger_ (infiltrating the base in Khazakhstan) and _The Only Easy Day… Was Yesterday_ (infiltrating the oil rig).]

Time being imperative, apparently, I found myself booked onto the first train available, and a clear indication of the importance of my new paymasters was that no one baulked at the short-notice, first-class fare, which provided me with breakfast and about six inches more legroom than standard, for the rack-rate price of a night at Claridges. As the dawn broke over the countryside whisking past me at an alarming speed, I rubbed my gritty eyes and considered my lot.

I'd read Riley's file twice in the last twenty-four hours, and whilst it was technically obvious why they were backing him for this job, I remained ambiguous. I had learnt through many years of hard experience that the average soldier shared the same level of technological literacy as an avocado. Of course, I came from the position of an extreme outlier, and I suspected most of the general population knew no better, but there's only so much of your life you can spend trying to winkle technical information about your enemies from the entirely ignorant before it because a highly contentious point.

Since he'd joined up, he'd been clean: no other convictions after the GBH that had caused him to be expelled from his comp sci course and drafted into the Army on a short-lived sentence reduction program. A short reconnoitre through his personnel file revealed technical abilities beyond the normal: cobbling together a virtual tunnel in his spare time to avoid restrictions on streaming porn on official computers to name but one of many, _many_ violations of MoD internet policy. He'd been sniffed by the Doughnut after the third offence, but had turned them down, preferring apparently to continue to live and die by the sword rather than the keyboard and had remained a thorn in the side of the sysadmins ever since.

Finally, after meditating on this dichotomy of the soldier programmer and the rest of the frankly bizarre mission parameters I'd been set for several hours, I stumbled from the train at Lockerbie, dragging my bags down behind me onto the empty platform.

Being deserted, I should have spotted him lurking straight away, but in the rush to prepare the file, no one had considered updating the photograph that went with it. Also, I was tired, and I had been expecting them to send a minion to transport me out to the base, so it took a few minutes for me to realise that the handsome, off-duty builder in his threadbare, sagging hoodie and filthy jeans was Riley himself.

My brain short-circuited. It had been prepared for gawky, pallid and spotty and had failed to apply the transformations of time, regular exercise and an improved diet. As I approached Riley pushed himself away from the wall he was slumped against without taking his hands from his pockets. His mouth twisted into a wry, rakish smile and I felt my own lips tighten in response. I had already envisioned, this sojourn to the arse-end of Scotland to be a special level of Hell, so things were looking up. Riley hadn't just grown into his features, he was strikingly handsome: an unexpected, and not unwelcome development.

"Miss Wolf?" He stared at me from beneath his hooded lids, his smile evolving into a sneer.

"Mr Riley" I replied, the smile dying on my lips and my tone icy. He knew how to address me properly, but he chose not to. I could correct him, but on the occasions before that I'd had to play out this tired old exchange, I'd been accused of pretentiousness. Now older, I knew a calculated insult thrown at me, an arrogant attempt to set the tone of the relationship. _Fuck you too!_ I thought.

He snorted, derisively. "I _knew_ you'd be a posh bird, but an actual _pashmina_?" He poured scorn into the last word.

"Says who?" I snapped back "The fucking Pearly King of West Freugh?"

He laughed. "That's a new one!" he said.

"Some of us make the effort." I sniped "This isn't even a pashmina. It's just a scarf."

"Yeah, alright" he replied, defensively. "You've made your point"

An awkward silence descended until he said, "Is that the lot?" and nodded towards my bags.

"Yes." I replied.

"This way." He jerked his head towards the side of the station, and where I guessed there was a car park. He didn't offer to help with the bags. _Wanker_ , I thought, bitterly, as I hauled myself along behind him. I opened the boot myself, and hefted my luggage in without assistance, but Riley held open the passenger door for me and I slid in without speaking to him.

A few moments later, he dropped behind the wheel. From the outside, the car - an old Golf GTI- appeared to be a spacious hot-hatch, but both of us cleared six feet, and Riley had packed about half my weight in muscle across his shoulders. It was distinctly cramped, and with no breeze between us, his cheap aftershave was suddenly overwhelming. I felt as if he had rammed a ball of sandpaper down my throat. He stuck the key in the ignition and turned to speak to me.

"You can call me Simon" he said, and he held out his hand. I took it, giving him a thin smile as I did so. His grip was warm, and dry. Old calluses and excoriations rasped under my soft fingertips.

"Stacey." I replied.

"Stacey" he repeated, letting go of my hand but holding my gaze as he twisted the key, the car roaring to life, his blue eyes alarmingly bright and piercing. He smiled, and I clenched my jaw against the spark I felt inside, trying to hold onto the pissed off feeling. Riley _was_ attractive, even if he was a prick.

"You the nerd then?"

"I'm a professional nerd, Simon. You're the one who does it for free in their spare time." I observed.

He laughed. "Fair point." He pulled out onto the street and started working his way out of the town. "How'd you land this job?"

"Skillset matched." I said, bluntly, allowing the two words to leave everything else unsaid.

"I thought they'd send us an American." He mused.

I shrugged. I couldn't be sure if he meant to make simple small talk or dig for more details. I didn't want him to press it, not just yet. I might technically have the skills to put off this caper, but I didn't feel like stressing my fragile confidence in subversion just yet.

"What's West Freugh like?" I asked, changing the subject.

"Unless you like cows, it's pretty much a complete shit hole in the middle of fucking nowhere. You'd have almost been just as fast flying to fucking Belfast and getting the ferry to Stranraer than getting the train and driving there."

"I heard there's a Book Town." I offered.

"Fucking nerds." He muttered. "Yeah. There's a Book Town. Knock yourself out. The rest of us just fuck off up the coast when we've got the chance, which tells you exactly how much fun it is."

I rolled my eyes and sighed. This was going to be a long six weeks.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter Two**

We made polite small talk for as long as possible, and I watched the low land roll past at speed from the window. He was right: there were _a lot_ of cows. I knew a lot about Riley, and he, I suspected, knew very little about me. In normal circumstances, this would have given me the upper hand, but because I was trying to develop some sort of rapport, it was a hindrance. I had to put more effort into the conversation pretending to be ignorant and it was a drain on my already tired mental resources.

I yawned, and asked "So, what made you interested in computers?" eventually, feeling that here at least, we had common ground.

He shrugged. "If you want to mess about on them, you have to learn how to cover your tracks, and I just found it easy, so I did it more and I learnt more, and it was interesting. I expect you went to _university_." he sneered.

"Yes, I did. Did that not appeal to you?" I refused to rise to another attempt to ignite a class war.

"Tried it, it was boring. I dropped out and joined up." This outright lie surprised me, because I knew the military tolerated, if not encouraged, violence against individuals in way that civilian culture did not. I had missed something here, and I made a mental note to return to it later, but couldn't press it now without exposing what I knew.

"Actually, you'd be surprised at how many people I meet that just started to get into cybersecrurity trying to hide their porn habit from their parents." I replied, instead.

"Including yourself?"

I laughed "No. I think it's just in my blood." I replied, ambiguously.

"And the Russian?"

I gave him a sidelong glance: it was an astute question. He glanced away from the road to give me a once over, his eyes narrowing suspiciously.

"Same reason. I was born in Omsk. My mother defected in '84. I came with her."

"Blimey." He said. "Proper bit of history, you."

He left it at that, at least. I knew, because I'd heard a lot of the responses to my statement of origin over the years, that he could have said something worse. People like me were born into the Cold War, and we'd never escaped it. One of the lucky ones, because I'd crossed the border into Iran before I could walk, my memories of Russia were probably just imagined. England had always been my home, and neither Gregor, nor my mother, ever said anything positive about our old homeland. Where other defectors felt conflict, struggled with their new freedoms, my mother revelled in it, but she escaped a tyranny that was personal, in the form of my father, rather than political. Never in my life had she expressed even a sigh of nostalgia.

Of course, I wasn't about to tell Riley all of that. At least not yet, anyway. We sat in silence and I watched the countryside roll by through gritty eyes. I had barely managed four hours of sleep, after getting back from yesterday's briefing, and trying to sort out my life before the sudden lurch several hundred miles north had exhausted me. We fell into a comfortable silence.

Meanwhile, Riley overtook whenever he could, the engine roaring to life as he pushed the pedal to the floor and killing any hope of further conversation. Each time the car pounced forward I pressed my feet to the into the footwell, tensely, and whenever an oncoming vehicle appeared on the horizon I fought the urge to cry out, but I must have concealed it well, or it didn't bother him, because he didn't slow down, or comment. I was an urbanite by choice, knowing neither speed or urgency in car, and accelerating over the legal speed limit to overtake a tractor when the single carriageway vanished round a bend in the near distance deeply unnerved me.

After half an hour of bearing this through gritted teeth, we reached the blessed dual carriageway going around Dumfries. I relaxed, and then the early start began to catch up with me. Lulled by the steady motion of the car, and the white noise of the air moving around us, I started to doze only to be jerked away when Riley shoved me in the shoulder what felt like only moments later.

"Sorry." I yawned, trying to stretch in the limited space. I peered blearily out of the window and saw the sea in the distance, glittering in the bright sun, just before the horizon. Seeing the Irish Sea up close, even if it was from the safe distance of a car, it suddenly hit me just how far the world had shifted in just ten days. I felt like I had come to the very edge of existence.

"Are we there yet?" I asked, and instantly regretted it, knowing full well how cliched it sounded.

Riley rolled his eyes. "No, not yet, but I didn't think you wanted to arrive snoring and drooling."

"I don't _snore_!" I replied, indignant. I wiped my face, and found it dry. _Wanker_. I thought, again.

I jerked at a loud and sudden thump, and I thought we had hit something, but the reverse was true: a biker had drawn level whilst overtaking and hammered his hand against the driver's side window. They made an obscene gesture and roared past. Riley laughed, honked the horn, and waved at their disappearing back.

"Friend of yours?" I asked.

"Roach." He replied. "Fucking petrol head."

"Roach?"

"Oh yeah. That's eh… Gary Sanderson to you."

I knew that name from somewhere, and then I remembered "Your back-up?" I had read Sanderson's file too and hadn't detected even the faintest interest in technology about him. The note accompanying it stated that Riley picked him himself, and I supposed that this was for reasons that would become apparent in time.

"Roach like… the insect, or the fish?" I asked, eventually, feeling that now I had attained wakefulness I should at least try to make conversation.

Riley snorted. "Bloody hell! The _fish_?"

"A roach is a kind of fish." I replied, defensive "It's a real thing."

He shook his head, laughing to himself "Sort of like the insect. Are roaches an insect?"

I looked at him incredulously, but it was a genuine question "Yes." I replied. "They _are_ an insect."

"Whatever, it doesn't matter. A while ago, he took an overdose of Viagra. You know the –"

"I know what Viagra is." I interrupted "Why-"

"Well, he thought he could go on for longer, I don't know. Probably made sense at the time. Anyway, we had to take him to the hospital and you should have seen the-"

"I'm sorry!" I held up a hand, trying to stop him before he could elaborate further. "What the fresh hell does this have to do with anything?"

"Well, cockroaches, right? They don't die. You can't kill them. Famous for it."

"Right…" I failed to see the connection.

"So… it was like a cock that he couldn't get rid of, like a cock… roach!"

I stared at him, my mouth slack with incredulity "That is the _singularly_ worst joke, I have ever heard."

"I know!" Riley's eyes lit up. "It's brilliant!"

"How long have you been calling him that?" I asked.

Riley shrugged, "Oh, about five years."

"I don't even know this man, and now I'm thinking about his penis. Thanks for that!" I said, sarcastically.

"You asked!" he replied and started laughing "Penis! You are so fucking posh!"

I knew no effective comeback from this, so I let him enjoy victory and whilst I tried (and failed) to push the unwanted image from my mind, a new thought popped into my head.

"Do you have a… nickname too?" I asked.

"Yeah actually. They call me Ghost."

I looked at him and he grinned back, lasciviously, daring me to ask. _Oh, surely not…_ I thought.

"This _surely_ is not because of some… _genitalia_ -based incident too?" I rubbed my hand across my mouth, trying to conceal my pained expression.

"Well not, _directly,_ as such, but we were in Helmand and-"

"Stop! Stop talking! Please! I was having a nice look at the sea after a nap until this started. I just want to go back to that."

"Well tough, because we're here."

He swung the car right across the road, passing a host of red MOD signs warning intruders and nosey passers-by to keep away. Ahead of us, the base stood out: a cluster of grey hangers and low buildings that were clearly nothing to do with the arable surroundings.

Riley wound down the window, flashing his ID at the two women guarding the gate with practised nonchalance. "Afternoon Mandas!"

"Afternoon Sir… and Ma'm." She nodded at me. We exchanged the thin smiles of women forced by circumstances outside our control to keep company with men that we didn't like. Her guarding partner walked round to the rear of the car, making a cursory check underneath with the assistance of an angled mirror on wheels. I was surprised; although it retrospect I shouldn't have been, that she was an American. The base technically still belonged to the MoD, but clearly their American tenants had the run of the place.

I pulled my brand-new CIA ID from my bag along with my old SIS one, and leant over to pass it through the window, which meant leaning over Riley awkwardly. I put my hand on the centre console to balance, trying to keep enough weight back to stop me falling into his lap. I regretted not just passing the badge to him, even though I knew he'd have a snide remark about the photographs, because leaning over whilst the guard checked it against her clipboard brought us uncomfortably close. He didn't look away. Instead he stared at me, narrowing his eyes and making it very clear that I was invading his personal territory. Under normal circumstances, I might have looked away to save myself the grief, but Riley needling me since I arrived changed that. I didn't look away.

We were less than six inches away from each other and his stare felt like hot needles in my forehead. I could feel my primitive brain panicking, trying to arch my back and drawn my lips back in a snarl, but I suppressed it, even though it practically burned. It excited me. It was a hostile invasion of his territory, and that felt good, but it mirrored occasions of intimacy close enough give me an extra thrill.

Riley continued to hold my stare, as the guard handed me back the badges, failing to notice that I pocketed all of them until I looked away and out of the window next to me. I heard him exhale he drove his foot down so hard on the accelerator that the wheels spun before we jerked forwards. It wasn't until we reached the hangers that I realised what had bothered me about his reaction to my closeness: he hadn't looked at me and seen an opportunity, or an invitation to anything further. He hadn't even dropped his gaze to the collar I'd left unbuttoned to allow a distractingly unobstructed view into my cleavage. Frankly, I was hurt.


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter 3**

 _48 hours previously…_

I returned to the crush of morning commuters after my week of enforced absence, filled with hollow longing for my old life. I had never considered that I would miss the miasma of body odour and stale grease that permeated the carriage in rush hour, but as I stepped aboard the packed train and inhaled the grim aroma of London-bound commuters, an aching nostalgia filled me. It refused to settle, and instead, as the carriage crept closer to the capital, mutated into a dense, anxious knot in my chest.

I stopped for a while at the riverside, letting the weak, pale rays of early morning sun caress my face before the crypt of HQ swallowed me in a wash of artificial light. Police reservists had been drafted in to supervise the streets, and the approach to the already foreboding SIS building re-enforced with sandbags and barbed wire, the spectre of war forcing London to adapt. I showed my passport, because of the bastards confiscating my ID, to an acne-scarred soldier who barely seemed old enough to buy a lottery ticket, never mind defend the country, and who looked me up and down with an expression of barely concealed derision before ticking my name off his list.

Gupta's reasons for requesting my presence remained unclear. I'd received a terse email requesting that I arrive by nine o'clock in the morning, with no other briefing, and further requests for information had been met with a stony wall of silence. When once I felt, as the bomb-proof doors sealed shut behind me, like coming home, now felt like being sealed in my own tomb.

 _A week._ As one of the more experienced analysts we had available on the Russian desk, pulling three times my usual workloads in areas that frankly I was grossly underqualified for in addition to what I was, I had been under a lot of pressure. The last thing we needed? Me indefinitely suspended on behalf of the Central Idiot's Agency, leaving with my belongings in a box, escorted past my wide-eyed former colleagues by security.

On balance, I considered myself lucky, and even pissed off, still grateful at whoever had vetoed my arrest and extraction to a CIA black site whilst they worked out whether the accusations of treachery were true. Clearly, I had a guardian angel several paygrades above me. The Yanks had to settle for my suspension and review by internal affairs when it suited them to do so, which it hadn't: yet.

It did _really_ piss me off. I had pointed out the error in the ACS software and any right-minded person, anywhere in Langley, should have been trumpeting my name with honours from the fucking rooftop because no one else had noted the great big hole their own development team had left there. Instead, they'd sat on the problem, and kept filling the skies with the vulnerable satellites _for the next three years,_ putting all their faith in security through obscurity, until one fell out of the skies into Kazakhstan, and Ivan's welcoming embrace.

I had told them so, and they had ignored me. They just patted me on the head and sent me back to Blighty only to come storming over on Monday to blame me for leaking the information to the Russians. The fact that the prick Riviera came to break the news just put the icing on my cake. I could sense the greasy little shit just dying to manhandle me onto an unmarked jet and play sadist. If Ivan started bombing us, I hope they hit Riviera's house first.

Gupta and Riveria, in his duty as official CIA liaison to British Intelligence, had met me in one of the big briefing rooms. She faced me across the empty table with her usual austerity and Riveria slouched several seats further along, picking his teeth between his snide expressions. She had told me some things directly, and implied some others that had, in retrospect, been interesting. Her recorded statement consisted of the stance that she and her team had no reason to suspect me of being a mole, because frankly, I'd had access to far more valuable information than the vulnerability of the ACS module, which I had openly told the Americans about. Riveria snorted at this, but Gupta had ignored him. If he'd been there to get some freebies, he went home empty handed, because when he pressed her, she refused to elaborate. I admired her more than ever.

Back in the present, despite knowing my way around the building better than my own flat, mandatory escort by security took me to another, smaller, briefing room where Gupta and a new man were waiting. A general in the US army, his dress uniform told me that, but I didn't recognise him and frankly, the shock of seeing him sitting incongruously next to Gupta, elegant simplicity in a sombre black suit, made it difficult to process.

"Dr Wolfe, this is General Shepherd." Said Gupta, rising with him as he stood to shake my hand. His grip dry, and cold around my hand, I felt a shiver, as if someone had walked across my grave.

"Good morning, sir." I replied. I glanced sideways at Gupta with a furrowed brow, hoping for a clue, but she just jerked her head in a way that indicated I should take a seat.

He waved his hand dismissively "Don't fret the formalities. Shepherd's fine."

"General Shepherd has expressed an interest in your _unfortunate_ situation." explained Gupta.

"Damn fools!" said Shepherd. "No offence to the present company, but sometimes… those folks in Intel get a little bit out of hand. Clearly, you're not to blame for this situation, and if anyone had had any sense when you first picked it up, they'd have acted on it. Instead, well… here we are."

"General Shepherd leads a Task Force, and for the last eighteen months, they've been trying to get a handle on the Ultranationalist extremist fringe elements."

 _Well, you certainly fucked up there_ , I thought, remembering Zakhayev International.

"These elements are part of what's behind the aggression we're seeing from Russia and removing them from the game board might destabilise the driving forces in the Duma and Russian armed forces that are keen for conflict. Of course, you already know this, but, just to put all the cards on the table." Gupta continued. "Because so much effort is currently consumed by the war itself, Shepherd has lost some of the analyst support he needs from Langley-"

"I'm sorry." I interrupted "Because it sounds like you're about to say that you want _me_ to go and work with the organisation that has currently insisted on my suspension."

"In a nutshell… yes." Shepherd replied and then he laughed. "I know you're an analyst, but you're quick. I like that."

Inside, I gritted my teeth. This was one step away from 'I like a girl with spirit!'

He continued "I know these accusations are bullshit, and frankly, I'm afraid that if I take another CIA body, I could be exposing myself to the very people who leaked your discovery and ironically, it's safer to take on the person I know is not guilty and who can do the work I need. The CIA can't spare me any more time than they have already allocated to us."

"May I speak frankly?" I asked.

"Of course," replied Gupta

"This is fucking bullshit!" I spat.

"I don't disagree" said Shepherd. He laughed again, a chuckle that exuded vintage Southern charm "I just want to try to make things right and complete my objective. I would be grateful, if you could consider this an opportunity that's an investment for the future. If we succeed, we might make a big different to both the course of the war, and Russia afterwards." He held up a file labelled with decelerations of imperative secrecy and threats for failing to comply with those instructions and pushed it across the table towards me. I thought about what he had left unsaid, the implication that cooperation now could repair my loss of standing much more rapidly that internal affairs could.

"I understand, you might want to think about this, and of course, I also understand why you're angry, but please, consider it."

"We don't mind, whatever you choose." Said Gupta. "But, I'm not sure you can handle twiddling your thumbs for the next few weeks whilst we do our own investigation. You might as well get some fresh air."

 _Fresh air?_ I thought, suspiciously. She glanced towards the file, implying that I should pick it up.

"Our objective is the gulag at Petropavlovsk." I winced at Shepherd's pronunciation, but let it go. "We have an interest in a high value prisoner. Storming the place could take weeks, with manpower we can't spare. Our aim is to strike at the place to provide cover for a small team to infiltrate. This will be made significantly easier if we can use the prison's control system against it."

I started to see the plan unfolding in my mind.

"Of course, we know a little about the system, and we have the blueprints, but we need it emulated in a way that our men can train with and work with when we get inside."

The accuracy of my guesswork gave a me a little satisfaction.

"Otherwise we're going to have dig in for a long, and potentially bloody siege that might lose us the VIP."

I nodded. Technically, I should be able to handle a job like this in my sleep as mapping ancient Russian control systems had been the mainstay of my early years here, in preparation for the manufacture of Stuxnet-a-likes when the budget allowed us the opportunity. I hadn't needed the extra emotional tug that my actions could save the lives of Shepherd's brave American boys.

I sighed. "What's the catch?"

Shepherd laughed. "You have to leave London. We're based Galloway, south of Scotland."

 _Fresh air._ I reminded myself. "And how long?"

"Six weeks minimum. The boy you'll be working already has a bit of an interest in technical matters, and a little bit of Russian. He'll have a fall back, but, he won't have as much experience."

I reserved judgement because 'an interest in technical matters' likely meant that he owned more than one games console and internally, rolled my eyes.

Gupta nodded at me, and then at the file on the table. I sighed, and picked it up, sealing my fate.

Shepherd's face brightened. "I'm glad to have you on board. He stood, and so did I, to shake my hand again and seal the deal.

"I'm afraid this is a flying visit. You have the file for the next forty-eight hours, and then we'll see you up at West Freugh. Ms Gupta will fill you in on the rest."

He said his goodbyes, and suddenly Gupta and I were alone, in the silent room.

"Now." She said, picking up the file Shepherd had left. "Forget this bullshit. Here's the real brief…"


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter 4**

"You are now cleared for _Phoenix Hornet_." Said Gupta, imperiously. "Your cover, and apparent primary objective is to do what Shepherd wants: teaching his men to break into the gulag. Secondly, you're going to gather information that allows us to assess whether his whole task force is corrupted, or not."

"I'm sorry. What?" I replied. I hadn't seen the bait-and-switch coming, and was still stunned.

"This." She tapped the file Shepherd had left with an elegantly manicured finger. "It's legit, they're calling it _Frozen Maze,_ and you can have as much fun as you like waxing lyrical to them about ancient pieces of Russian software. What's not legit, is Shepherd himself."

"What do you mean? Shepherd's a _spy_?" I said, incredulously.

"No. Not quite. We knew he's been deliberately manipulating the US government and its agencies, into a pro-war position for many years, but that's not a surprise given his background and just because it runs counter to the prevailing political mood, doesn't _actually_ make it treason. Do you know anything about Shepherd?" Gupta asked.

"No. I just met him." I answered.

She frowned, that statement clearly disappointing her "In 2011, he oversaw US operations in Asir."

I made the connection: Asir's budding revolutionaries had jumped into bed and been rounded fucked by fringe Russian ultranationalists who had used their intended plans for glorious freedom from tyranny to shove a nuclear bomb firmly up the arse of the Americans supplying the opposition. Asir had been a new ring for the old fights, except that where usually there was oversight from Moscow and Washington to stop things getting out of hand, the fractured factions of the Russian civil war had no such structure, no one to stop Zakhayev's _protégés_ from taking it too far.

I had joined SIS that year, and the nuke had been my baptism of fire. Suddenly the Russian desk was at the front of national intelligence interest, and where the strike teams had been the arrows, we were the bows providing the aim and direction of their objective under an awful lot of tension.

"Shepherd's force, vying for control of Sabya at the time, was wiped out." Gupta continued, breaking me out of my reverie "Thirty thousand American soldiers died because of that bomb. It hit him hard, and we think the subsequent withdrawal of American forces from the region made him disaffected with his government."

I could understand this. Post-nuke US had two options: go hard or go home. Faced with the losses it had already incurred in the Middle East, and the lack of a clear, objective enemy, it went home and left the people of Asir to work out the power vacuum left when the revolution's heart, and the remaining population of the capital had been wiped out. To Shepherd, it would have seemed as if the lives of his troops had been wasted, the worst possible crime.

"He wants a war." Said Gupta "He wants a tough government in power, making a stand against the Russians. A government with defence policy above all else. He wants vengeance, at all costs."

"At all costs?"

Gupta took a deep breath "We think he's playing both sides against one another."

"You think he's in bed with the _Russians_? After _Sabya_?" I struggled to get my head around that. Shepherd was clearly a major player, being commander in chief of the Asir operation told me this. That he could be working for the Russians unnoticed seemed unbelievable, but if Burgess, Blunt and McLean had taught us anything, it was that just because it wasn't believable, didn't mean it wasn't true.

I began to extrapolate from Gupta' statement "This Task Force is meant to finish what happened in Asir. To finish Makarov. That's the public version, I guess, because I don't think we'd be having this conversation if there wasn't another agenda."

"Perceptive as ever." Gupta smiled. "Shepherd's Task Force, the 141, emerged about two years ago. The idea wasn't apparently well supported, and he was granted a bare minimum of funds and personnel. He put in a request six months later to borrow some of our blades to boost numbers and appointed one of them de facto commander. Do you remember John MacTavish?"

A very distant bell rang somewhere in my memory.

Gupta slid a photograph towards me and then I remembered: _that_ MacTavish.

"Yes. Yes, I do." I said, and pushed away the inappropriate thought that popped immediately into my head.

"We need to know if MacTavish is ignorant of Shepherd's real goals, or if he's actively working with him. Shepherd isn't working alone. His oversight is provided by the CIA, and the fact that he's able to play both sides against one another would suggest that he's being protected, or ordered to do so, from high up in the agency."

I raised my eyebrows. What Gupta was suggesting: essentially a coup by the CIA in Washington was remarkably audacious. I couldn't quite believe it, and yes, the last five years had no doubt changed MacTavish as much as they had changed me, but… _surely not?_ "We know a lot of agency personnel were pissed off at seeing their pals die in Sabya, with no retribution, or justice, but, up until Shepherd started making enquiries after you, no one was able to put the pieces of the puzzle together."

She continued. "Shepherd's group is just one overseen by a committee whose budget has increased year on year and whose existence wasn't even extrapolated by us until last week, a worrying fact in itself. Shepherd is surviving on a shoestring budget just to keep up appearances so that no one cares about his Task Force's objective, or what they do daily."

"Where's the rest of the money going?" I asked.

Gupta was silent. "That's more than you need to know. Suffice to say, some of it has turned up where it shouldn't be."

I was silent for a few moments, and then decided the time was right to raise what I thought to be the most pertinent point. "I'm not a field agent. This is not my remit"

"But you were, once." Gupta interrupted.

"I thought about it one." I replied "I went on the basic training and didn't continue when it was obvious my skills were more valuable elsewhere. I have no active experience."

"But you were good at it."

I snorted. "I thought you'd do better than flattery"

"Give yourself credit where it's due." Said Gupta. "Your instructors did. Some of them were quite disappointed that you were swayed by the analyst faction in the end."

"I'm _not_ an operational agent." I repeated "I'm certainly not qualified to spy on our own personnel."

"Tell me about the ACS module." Said Gupta, abruptly changing the subject and ignoring my remonstration.

Flustered, it took me a minute to work out what she was asking. "The code?"

"Yes, but tell me how you saw the ACS code in the first place."

I wanted to point out that she could have read about this in the transcript of my conversation with internal affairs, but Gupta never did anything without a reason, so I humoured her.

"I was on loan to Langley, about four years ago. I'd been cooperating with them remotely up until then, and it was felt some face-to-face time would improve our teamworking."

 _"Virident Salon"_ she replied, and I nodded.

"In one of the files for _Virident Salon_ , was a code transcript for part of the ACS module. I had no idea what it was at the time, but I thought that it must somehow, very obliquely, relate to something later in the file, so I read it, and spotted the injection vulnerability. It wasn't until I read the rest of the file that I realised: it wasn't anything to do with _Virident Salon._ "

"How do you think it got there?" she asked.

I shrugged. "That file had belonged to another agent, and he was reallocated in the middle of my time there, so it came to me. I presumed that he either muddled the code in from another project, or it was an error when the file was put together."

Gupta sighed, steepling her fingers beneath her chin. "I'm not going to tell you that the agency doesn't make mistakes, because in my experience it fucks up on a daily basis in a thousand small ways that usually make a mess of my day, but we don't think that piece of code ended up there by mistake."

This startled me "You think I was meant to find it?"

"Yes."

"In a destiny sort of way or in a conspiracy sort of way?"

Gupta gave me a terse smile. "What do you think?"

I didn't know what to think, because the implications of what Gupta was suggesting was enormous. I had gone to Langley _four years ago_ , and to suggest that not only had it been infiltrated by Russians, but that they had been setting up the endgame of invade the US at this point, was inconceivable.

"I think… _fucking hell!_ That's what I think." I said.

"That's what I think too, but the reality is such we believe you were set up to find that information, and as an outside agent, take the fall for leaking it to the Russians, drawing attention away from the fact that it was an inside job."

"Shit." I said, appalled at the audacity of the plan.

"Shit indeed." Said Gupta. She continued "Now. Shepherd wants you out of the way, because he hadn't quite appreciated the strength of your position, what else you had access to and the fact that you'd openly declared finding that piece of code to the rest of the project team when you got back."

"When you say… out of the way…"

"Killing you has consequences. Don't worry. Just giving you room and board for six weeks and distracting you to do a job they genuinely need doing... well… that solves a lot of problems for everyone and it looks like good ol' Shep is on the right side of whatever internal politics are going on in Langley."

She smiled benignly, full of apparent concern "However unqualified you feel, doesn't matter. MacTavish trusts you. Shepherd doesn't suspect you. You are the best unfettered access that we have to the 141. We know the Russians will try to drag us into this war, and we need to have our house in order before they attack. We have to know if this is far as it goes."

I sighed. However, flowery Gupta's words were, this was an order, not a request. "I'll do it." I said, with the unnerving sensation that I was sealing my own doom.


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter 5**

Riley swung the car around the side of the hangers, making for the low buildings on the other side, which, looking by their design, had been there since the base first opened in the forties. It wasn't exactly the hive of activity I expected: A lonely Chinook parked on the apron in front of an open hanger, attended by a retinue of mechanics who stopped to stare as Riley accelerated over the tarmac a two-man patrol on the far side of the perimeter and a group playing basketball by what I presumed by the living quarters.

I had made it through the first hurdle: the base's security detail; although not that I had really been expecting them to crack out the gloves for a cavity search. Still, it gave me a thrill to know that concealed on my person was an arsenal of contraband listening devices of various sorts. My stare-out with Riley had been a distraction for myself more than anything, and proved that I still had some craft abilities left given that I now had his ID badge as well as my own; although I wasn't sure whether or not it would be of any value to me, it just felt good to know I was still capable as a thief.

He parked outside the furthest building, marked by a rotting sign that designated it "Admin" and next to the motorbike that had burned us on the road earlier. As I opened the door, a crisp wind rushed in, bringing with it a noxious stench: the bastard offspring of silage and kerosene. I tried to keep my expression neutral but couldn't.

"Out the car if you're going to be sick." Said Riley, smirking. I deliberately let go of the handle and the gust caught it, knocking it into his knee. I pretended not to see him wince.

After the shelter of the car, the warm summer gust roared in my ears, light that would have been weakened in the London smog blinding me. I shielded my eyes with my hands. Above my head a dome of cloudless blue sky stretched over wild green fields peppered with gorse into the distance, and beyond that, only the sea until Ireland. I had a sudden intense pang of ludicrous agoraphobia after years living under the shadow of skyscrapers, ludicrous because I'd grown up in the green belt of suburbia that orbited London before I'd been drawn in to the true metropolis. This place wasn't the tame countryside I'd known as a child, this retained its wildness like a captured animal.

"Dr Wolf, as I live and breathe."

A familiar Highland brogue jerked me back to reality. Older than I remembered: the skin of his face a little less bright, a little more weathered but his eyes retaining their intense steel grey, John MacTavish had aged from boyish good looks into frank handsomeness. When I'd known him, withered after months of well-intentioned but suboptimal nursing in the shrinking heartlands of Russian loyalism he'd been anaemically pale, but his return to the rigours of his employment, and the perennial stodge that the Army's catering division churned out had brought back his vivacity. His wiry, dark hair had been shaved into an alarming mohawk from his widow's peak to the nape of his neck. Like Riley, broad, thick in the neck and shoulders, I saw the line that connected the two of them back through the mists of time to the warriors of the Gaels and Picts that had trodden these very lands two thousand years ago. For the first time in my life, I felt the sense of being an outsider, a strange, Slavic intruder, full of lies and traps beneath.

"It's good to see you, Captain MacTavish." I replied, a broad smile on my face to conceal my nervousness. Riley might have dampened my thrill at crossing the threshold of West Freugh, but when MacTavish looked at me, I felt the same excited shudder that I had felt so many years ago.

We shook hands, his palm over mine, in a gesture of confidence that bordered on arrogance. Like Riley his hands were dry, with the same rough spots and scars of active work. His hand lingered on mine a beat beyond strictly polite, gently letting go in way that let his fingers caress mine, sending an electric crackle that sparking and dancing over my skin, the hairs prickling on my arm as it did so.

"You two know each other, then?" said Riley behind me. He raised a single, curious eyebrow when I turned to him.

A flicker of annoyance passed over MacTavish's face at his intrusion. "We've met." He replied.

"Yes," I said. "I remember _you_." I smiled.

I stared at him, our gazes levelled, hoping he realised that when I had said "Another time, another place" to cushion the blow of my professional refusal to his advances, I had meant it. Ironically given the nature of my true objective, failing to exploit the attraction between us would now be considered unprofessional. Exploiting him sexually hadn't been specifically part of my brief, but now that I had seen him in the flesh, I knew I couldn't let the opportunity pass by.

MacTavish had an underling, who stood to attention at his desk outside the office when I came in. He dismissed his attentions with a nod, and held the door open for me himself, not bothering to introduce me. I nodded at the man, whose labels demonstrated that he was a Private R. Tusk. He nodded back.

MacTavish's office had been furnished to the peak of fashion around forty years ago. The glass over the window was rippled to obscure it, preventing prying eyes from spying on what was within. Working on the presumption that my presence on the base automatically cleared me for everything that MacTavish was cleared for, he hadn't drawn the curtains on the various noticeboards around us, on which were pinned an assortment of maps, photographs and other paraphernalia that was apparently deemed necessary to plan their missions. I identified the board for Frozen Maze by the pornographic drawing of a snowman and a princess from children's film that partly shared its name.

"So," He dropped down into the swivel chair behind his desk, and leant back, spreading his legs wide but folding his arms across his chest. "How did you land up in this caper?" he asked.

I picked one of the threadbare chairs in front of the desk to sit on, which put me diagonally opposite him and made the desk seem less of a barrier. Unlike his casual pose, I sat primly on the edge of the seat, my legs tucked beneath me. Incongruous with everyone else I had seen on the base, I had chosen business dress deliberately, to set the tone of the relationship.

"You need the schematics of the system, and someone who can teach you to use it to your advantage. Both of those things belong to British Intelligence. I have the greatest expertise in the area." I smiled warmly.

"Just seems pretty low-level stuff." He replied

I bridled under that remark. "But not at a low enough level for you to understand yourselves." I replied, in a venomous tone, my expression souring. I could have simpered, drawn him to me with flattery, but I had the sense that he wasn't that type of man. He had been slightly in awe of me all those years ago, and I would prefer to keep it that way.

"Easy now." he said, raising his hands. "That came out wrong."

I relaxed a bit. MacTavish had hit an obvious weak point in my being here: this was a relatively low-level job, and one that should have been handed to someone more junior. Had Shepherd not named an agent in question to be allocated to him, he would have received someone we could spare more easily. I let a stony silence descend, even though I really wanted to tell him it was alright, trying to distract him from pressing this line of conversation further.

He sighed "Would you like a coffee?"

"Yes, please." I said, stiffly.

There was a fancy coffee maker on the sideboard beneath the window, and he switched it on. "Courtesy of the American war machine." he said, proudly. "I guess it makes up for the rest of this dump." He had his back turned towards me. His shoulders were broad beneath his black shirt, his body tapering to a narrow waist. _Yum yum!_ I would have liked to spend some time admiring the curve of his backside, but he turned back to me, a frothy coffee in a mug branded with the dagger insignia of his parent regiment.

"So, I'm sure Shepherd briefed you on this." He waved his hand at the _Frozen Maze_ board. "We're hoping that with your help, it's a nice get-in-quietly-get-out-quietly affair."

"Well, I can't guarantee that, but if you can get to the control room, and you know how to work the control system, you should be able to find anyone, and get anywhere, that you need to be." I said.

"Well, Ghost's pretty capable with... technology." He waved his hand dismissively at the PC in front of him. On the one hand, his ignorance grated on me, but on the other, I realised that it was going to be genuinely useful, as he was unlikely to notice was about to seriously violate his machine.

"And..." I hesitated over the right choice of name for him, and tried not to think about my conversation with Riley in the car too intently "...Roach?"

"Oh... did he tell you why-"

I cut him off "He mentioned it in passing, yes."

MacTavish smiled. "Roach is bit of a... man of two halves? He's good with his hands: he fixes that bike of his himself, and fuck knows what he's on about half the time with his cylinders and crankshafts but on paper... well... he's not exactly academic."

"Do you disagree with him as a choice?" I asked.

"Well... it's Ghost's choice, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't think it was at least partially motivated by the fact they're inseparable, but at the same time, he doesn't seem fazed by the idea." He shrugged, as if it was beneath his concern.

"Can he read Cyrillic?" I asked, hopefully.

"Not any better than any of the others can."

"I'm sure I can make do, and at least if he gets on well with... Ghost." I couldn't say it easily, it was too odd "Then at least they can practise together without me."

"Have you got better things to do?" MacTavish raised an eyebrow,

"No, but I still have my work in London. I'm just going to do it remotely, and I still have to build some sort of test system for them. At least if they're friends, they won't have to waste time building up a rapport and that'll make it easier for them to practise." I elaborated.

He frowned at this, his mouth a thin line. "You might have to put than on hold for a few days, we just heard you were coming yesterday and they haven't connected up your office." My expression showed my disappointment. "We've got wifi, but it's not exactly speedy. I suppose..." he considered for a moment "I've got to head into town on business, you can use my office if you like?"

I blinked. _Surely not..._

"I'll log you in so you can check your email. Promise not to look up any porn though?"

Rendered speechless by this most abysmal breach of basic security, it took a few moments to compose myself "I'll... not look up the porn." I said, eventually. "That's very generous of you. Thank you" I smiled, warmly.

"Excellent!" He looked pleased to have ingratiated himself with me at last. "Come on, I'll show you around."

It took twenty minutes, during which we found a few other members of the task force and their supporting units, the latter of which were at least helpfully labelled by name. I was grateful that MacTavish didn't try to explain how they had all been given their amusing little nicknames because frankly, knowing what I knew about Roach, I didn't want to know how a man came to be known as Meat, or Worm.

After seeing the canteen, the firing range (which came with an offer of a gun that I temporarily deferred), the gym and the unoccupied room furnished with the same ancient furniture that adorned MacTavish's office that was to be my base, MacTavish handed me the key to my room in the accommodation block and sent me back to Private Tusk, who helpful ensconced me in MacTavish's vacant chair.

When the door was closed, I thought would feel relief, but instead I just felt irritated. MacTavish's lax attitude to security made starting the job insultingly easy, ruining the careful, intricate plans I been planning on laying to plant my bugs in his office. It was infuriating, and I had to fight back a childish urge to kick something petulantly.

For a while, I just sat there, not really sure where to start. I considered making myself another coffee, but reasoned and anxious palpitations were not generally made better by caffeine, and there was a thin line between performance enhancement and paralysing anxiety that I was in serious danger of crossing. Instead, I closed my eyes, and placed my hands flat on the table. I was here to _know_ MacTavish, and that started in what I had to imagine was his _brain_ , because this was, after all, the nerve-centre of the 141's operations. I slid my fingers across the worksurface. There was a warm patch where he'd put his own mug, rough the stains of the many times he'd placed it there before. I brushed crumbs and grit. The keyboard was sticky under my fingers with months, possibly years of grime unchecked. I opened my eyes and regarding the tide marks of grease and skin on the keys with disgust.

The room smelled of bitter coffee, cigar smoke and aftershave, but with a strong note of gunpowder and old disinfectant underneath. I considered my corner of the Russian desk, or rather, the cubicle that had been my corner of the Russian desk and felt clearly the divide: I wiped the place down morning and night, imported my pastel, minimalist stationary from Japan and understood the meaning of the word "coaster". Clearly, there was no spiritual connection.

Satisfied that now I was calm, or at least more familiar with the space around me, I got to work. It took me an hour in total to image the machine, replace the perfectly normal Ethernet cable with one that wasn't, slot in the keylogger and distribute a series of bugs around the room. All of them fed back to my own machine, which was currently sitting at my feet with a totally innocuous hard drive full of only moderately classified secrets that _Frozen Maze_ allowed me to have. _Pheonix Hornet_ was concealed in the lining of the case.

Once I had finished, I wandered around the room, looking at the plans for using the invaded drilling platforms as a stepping stone to the attack on the gulag with interest for a few moments, but there was nothing else new on any of them otherwise to me, veteran of the Russian civil war's bloody history. A photograph by the coffee machine caught my eye and my jaw clenched. Of course, we would need to have a conversation about _him_.


	6. Chapter 6

Late in the afternoon, grimy with the sweat and accumulated dirt of eight hours travelling, and on the post adrenaline high of my covert assault on MacTavish s office, I finally lugged my bags across the threshold of my new home: a single room in a musty flat, trapped in a loveless marriage of polyester and brown. I flopped down on the bare mattress, without even bothering to take off my shoes and stared at the yellowed ceiling.

MacTavish s eagerness to placate me had worked in my favour, and had taken my mind away from the serious finality of the situation. I was now working alone, against Britain s allies, spying on my own countrymen, several hundred miles away from my previously comfortable existence. Undertrained, lacking any active experience and working entirely on my own initiative, the precariousness of the situation beared down on me.

Mentally, in an effort to quell the rising anxiety about being discovered, I checked off my successes: I had met Riley and despite strong urges, had not strangled him. I congratulated myself on my iron-clad self-control. In addition, I had thoroughly violated MacTavish s office PC and planted enough surveillance in his office to ensure that nothing he did in there went unrecorded for the next few days. I allowed myself a few moments of smug satisfaction, even if the last two were mostly down to luck rather than skill.

I considered switching on my own laptop and reaching out to my eyes and ears hidden in his office. I didn t yet know how MacTavish felt about me, really, but I sensed he was interested, and when the time was right, I could exploit that to my own gain. I remembered his hand lingering on mine, his intense, steady gaze searching my face and I shivered. I thought about how it would feel to stare into them as his lips were on mine, his breath hot on my face. _Yes. This is going to be fun.._

* * *

The new guards on the morning shift regarded my idea of running through the warm drizzle into the town, with frank horror, but I waved their concerns aside. I needed time to think alone and make my drop. Most pressingly, I had to get into MacTavish s rooms, and find his personal PC. From a distance, stopping for a sly gulp from my water-bottle as cover, I scoped out the buildings. iTechnically,/i there was access to MacTavish s rooms across the flat roof, but there was also a parapet concealing what I presumed was some sort of ventilation system. I thought of hanging in the air, attached only to the building by a grappling hook, and shuddered. I just wasn t going to be that type of spy.

It took me three-quarters of an hour to get to to the town on foot, and at speed. Since the glorious summer of yesterday, the weather had taken a distinctly Scottish turn, with grey skies stretching unbroken to the horizon, intermittently pissing down a weak rain. In London, I would have regarded this with some annoyance, but this was fresh and clean. As I crested the hill and began my long descent towards the coast, I was almost enjoying myself.

The old port town of Stranraer existed only to allow travellers to not be in Stranraer as soon as possible, most visitors working their way to Cairnryan and across the Irish Sea, but there was a local hard-cord contingent of around several thousand clinging grimly to the outpost. I thought about Riley s poor opinion of the place, and felt it was a bit over the top. It didn t have the money that Hereford had, but I could see at least one place that claimed to provide decent coffee. This time, however, it was strictly business: I picked up my rental car, provisions and a duvet before I scoped out my contact s drop location: a car in the long-stay parking at the ferry terminal, identifiable by the Garfield on the parcel shelf.

In the centre console, as instructed, I picked up the CD cases jammed in the space next to handbrake: a James Bond soundtrack collection, amongst others. I rolled my eyes. Beneath these, I peeled back the protective rubber cover in the base of the hollow and dropped in a microSD card. I didn t have much to report, but I still had to make contact every week, unless otherwise instructed. After that I read the instructions under the seat with the next set of keys and drove to a quiet residential street at the edge of town. My contact would pick it up later. It was clunky, and annoying, but with any luck, it would work to keep observers off my tail.

* * *

Back in the enfolding barbed wire embrace of West Freugh, I parked up next to Riley s Golf, making sure I was close enough to stop him getting in through the driver s side door. It was petty, but I was in that sort of mood. There was noise coming from the gym and the mess room, so I avoided both and sped up the stairs. Sweaty and soaked from the rain, I was desperate for a long shower.I was therefore complete appalled, as I stood naked in the bathtub, to find that instead of a cool, refreshing deluge, the showerhead spurted once, and collapsed into a dribble of freezing water. I turned it off, and then on again, and then I hit it hard against the wall: nothing. I fought back the urge to scream in exasperation and then stopped, realizing that this was _perfect_.

* * *

"Have you got another shower I could I use? Mine s not working. I said, slouching casually against the doorframe of MacTavish s office. I d tidied myself up a bit, but tried to retain a tousled look, a sly nod to other exertions.

It was quite hard to keep a straight face, looking at his wide eyed, startled expression. I had lost the old t-shirt and leggings combination in favour of my best sports bra and a pair of leggings with side vents up to my hips, criss-crossing the exposed skin with strips of stretchy black fabric. They didn t leave much to the imagination as they hugged the skin of my legs and backside, but that was what I wanted.

To his credit, MacTavish only glanced down my body once and then keep his stare on my face, but it was obvious from the tension in his expression that it was taking all of his conscious effort not to slide downwards. I almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

Get the maintenance guys out for Dr Wolfe s shower He said to the lackey manning the desk. He scratched his head and then, exactly as I had predicted he would, rummaged in his pockets for moment and then held out a set of keys. You can use mine.

Great. I said, keeping my tone as deadpan as possible as I took them, even though I really wanted to laugh. I ll only be about half an hour, and I raised my eyebrows ...maybe I ll see you later. I gave him a tight smile and, inclining my head, held his gaze for a beat too long. His jaw clenched.

I turned round, and I knew even without glancing to check in the glass reflections, exactly where his eyes went to watch me walk away.


	7. Chapter 7

I didn't need thirty minutes to take a shower, even a decadent session of self-love and cleansing would take a little over twenty. The time window was tight, but I could do it. I put my money on MacTavish giving it slightly beyond the half-hour mark before he turned up, probably with an excuse about forgetting something important. I had given him hints, but nothing that could be overtly pinned down as a sexual invitation, just enough to warrant follow up with a polite tete-a-tete in the kitchen, whilst he worked out if he could make a move.

Euphemistically, I would say MacTavish lived a bachelor lifestyle: a level of slobbishness deemed socially acceptable only if you were male. I opened the door to the lingering odour of stale takeaways, damp clothes and curiously juxtaposed expensive cologne. The remains of a cooked breakfast lay abandoned by the sink, crumbs and flecks of grease scattered across the worktop; the contents of the overflowing bin confirmed my nose's suspicion about last night's dinner. Bugs placed, I left a tiny flash drive fighting for control of his sticky laptop abandoned conveniently next to the microwave.

In the bedroom, I found an unmade single bed, with rumpled army blankets but surprisingly clean sheets. Amongst the personal detritus of day-to-day living was a selection of trashy action movements, cheap paperback thrillers and a large stack of unsorted, but clean laundry that sent his approval rating with me skyrocketing. I rifled through it as best I could, trying to leave it looking undisturbed, but there was nothing much of interest.

Entering this space, his inner sanctum had given me the thrill I'd been waiting for. I had a good excuse as to why I was in the rest of his flat, but here I was genuinely invading his privacy, breaking social codes and the rule of law. The feeling melded with the faint excitement I'd been feeling since I had arrived at the base: MacTavish's feelings about me hadn't changed, and I certainly found him attractive. I didn't know when it was going to happen, but at some point soon, we were going to fuck, and the prospect delighted me.

The excited palpitations peaked when I touched the tabernacle of his sanctum: the bedside drawer. As I pulled it open, I felt genuinely guilty, and a little bit turned on. I paused when I saw what lay within: three passports. Either two were fakes, or John-Paul MacTavish was the eldest of a set of identical triplets. I snapped the data pages of all three for HQ. The pleasant feelings of excitement turned cooler: this was suspicious. Beneath this, a plastic sachet of white, crystalline powder gave me a genuine cold feeling. I would take a sample later for my support team to analyse, but I knew that it was either cocaine or ketamine, and the presence of neither was reassuring: if MacTavish had a habit, it was a vulnerability, a point where the enemy could blackmail or bribe him. Shit. I thought. As I went to start rummaging through the cupboard beneath a beep from my watch started me: ten minutes left. With an angry sigh I pushed the drawer shut and headed for the shower.

At the thirty-seventh minute, I heard the knock at the door. I had pushed the drugs and the passports out of my mind, and tried instead, as the warm, cleansing water ran over me, to think about his arse instead, and after five minutes of imaging kneading his flesh under my fingers, I made it into the zone, When I heard him coming up the stairs, I was sitting on a chair in the kitchen, my right leg bent and my foot twisted under the opposite cheek of my bottom, so that the heel put just enough pressure between my legs to be pleasantly arousing.

It took me a minute to pretend to compose myself, before I Ioosened my dressing gown to show a decent eyeful of cleavage and a little flash of black lace. I had saved me best and least practical bra exactly for this scenario.

"Can I help you?" I said as I opened the door. Leaning forward, I lounged against the frame, my forearm flush with wood, I attempted to emulate every shitty porno stereotype I knew. I really needed a sheer black gown trimmed with ostrich feathers to complete the look, but I did my best with the faded chintz of John Lewis instead.

"Um…" He looked me up and down, and the effort he put into keeping his gaze level with my face was commendable. I almost felt sorry for him. "Sorry. I… er... forgot my laptop."

"Right." I replied, with what I hoped was just a hint of incredulity."I'll just get my things." I said, and headed back to the bathroom.

"Do you want a cup of tea?" He shouted from the kitchen.

"Ooh! I'd kill for a cup a tea. I'm parched!" I called back. Actually, I wanted champagne, and tiny but extortionately expensive chocolates, but I could make do. I strolled back into the kitchen, unwrapping the towel I'd twisted round my hair and shaking it loose, hoping the effect was more tousled ingenue, and less drowning victim, to find him setting out his best china: an obvious freebie from Heckler and Koch and a mug that had probably been stolen from Dumfries and Galloway Sexual Health Services, festooned with cartoon personifications of venereal diseases. Chlamydia stared back at me with a worryingly sensual expression. I let this pass without comment, feeling it was better just not to know some things, and we sat in an awkward silence until he spoke.

"What do you think so far?" he said.

I shrugged. "Nice enough part of the world. Fresh air." I stretched out under the table, resting my calves on the seat of the chair beside him "I guess there's some perks." I said the last part with a raised eyebrow, and looked at him over the rim of my mug.

The muscles of his left arm twitched, as if he wanted to reach down and slide his hand across my naked skin up beyond my knees. Mentally, I willed him on, but there was nothing more than shift of his posture and a wincing expression, hopefully because I was causing something to happen between his legs.

"I don't get you." He said, shaking his head. "I always thought you were a bit icy, back in the day…" he trailed off "And when you got here…"

I mentally rolled my eyes. "Interrogation 101: do not fuck the interviewee, do not pass go, do not collect £200. It affects the quality of the data. It's a breach of at least five departmental procedures and frankly, it… just doesn't feel right"

He opened his mouth to speak, but I continued "Secondly, I arrived here after several hours of public transport and two hours in a car with His Nerdship. Tell me if that would put you in a good mood?"

"But which one is the real you?" He interrupted, grinning.

"All of them." I replied. "But if you carry on providing me with appropriate levels of caffeine, the grumpy bitch can have a rest."

He gave me a sly grin. "And what if I liked the grumpy bitch?"

"Down, boy." I said, the admonishment diluted by my snorting laugh into my mug.

"Seriously though." He said "Have you reconsidered my offer."

I rolled my eyes. I wasn't sure if he was just devoid of guiding ethical principles, or just stupid. "I didn't turn down your offer of getting off my tits in the Pudding Club because I didn't want to fuck you. I did it because I'm a professional and that situation was governed by obligations to other people, not me. This…" I circled my hand in the air to indicate our surroundings, "is different."

"Yeah, but-"

"Christ!" I drained the dregs, and got up. "Do you want to know what hole to put it in as well?" I snapped, slamming the mug down by the sink.

As I rummaged for something to wash up with, I heard his chair scrape across the linoleum, his presence suddenly behind me, and I paused. He wasn't close enough that I could feel his breath, but he was close enough that the skin between my shoulder blades prickled. I waited, my hands on the countertop edge, closed my eyes and exhaled slowly over a count of eight, letting the tension in my shoulders drop away. When I opened my eyes, he had taken a step closer, enough that the spectre of his reflection loomed behind me in the glass of the the kitchen window.

When his hand brushed the side of my dressing gown, I was expecting it, but that didn't mean it thrilled me any less. I gave a little start, an involuntary movement that I just couldn't help. I could feel his breath now, warm and damp over the skin of my neck, slowly and inorexably moving closer. Warm air danced over my skin as he exhaled softly, and a shiver rippled through me, leaving tingles in its wake. I was holding my breath until the moment his lips brushed the downy hair at the nape of my neck and then I let out a long, shivering exhalation as the tension discharged a sizzling trail over shoulders ploughed on down through my belly and grounded between my thighs like a bolt of electrical charge.

I arched my back, letting my head loll against him, the closely shaven hair on his temples scraping across my ear with a delicious roughness as he gnawed playfully at my neck, riding the dividing line between pleasure and pain. He took the lobe of my ear between his teeth, pulling, teasing gently and I was appalled to hear myself purr with delight.

His thumb slid inside one of the belt loops in my gown and he used the extra grip to push me round to face him, all the uncertainty in his expression gone, and I just rolled with it, losing myself in the wild moment. His kiss was the sudden pounch of a tiger, a powerful thrust forward that drove his lips onto mine as he pressed me to his body. My mouth was filled with his hot breath, and then his tongue slid over mine.

I kissed him back, unable to match him for force, but a twist of my leg knocked his balance, so he had no base to push from. As he stepped back, I pressed forward, my hands tugging his t-shirt free from the waistband of his trousers. For a moment he let go of me and we parted enough for me to see his wry smile as he pulled the shirt over his head and threw it into the corner.

I saw his magnificent body for only a second and then he was on me again. My hands clawed at the bare skin of his back, the thick muscles ripping below my fingers as he pulled the gown down over my shoulder. I let go of my to wriggle my arm free and it hung around my waist, caught by the knotted belt.

MacTavish did not appear to have gentle in his vocabulary. He pressed himself against me until my back was against the wall, worrying my neck like an animal. For a careful, methodical woman like myself, this was wild, thrilling deviance and I found that I loved it. I grabbed his face and answered like for like, ravenous. His stubble grated under my fingers, abrasive across his face and then a gentle fuzz at the back of his head until I grabbed the longer strands that formed the mohawk and pulled hard until he yelped.

In the small remaining part of my mind left to work the logic circuits, I suspected that he wanted to get at me, to assert himself and his dominance over me for turning him down all those years ago, but I wasn't having that. If I was here to professionally fuck over MacTavish, that's what I was going to do. I wasn't going to be his plaything. He was going to be mine and to hell with any fragile ego trying to get in my way.

I circled my fingers into his hair and clenched my fist, pulling his head back and exposing his neck. His eyes were wide as I lunged at him, wildly disinhibited. We were matched for height, so although he had more weight in his favour, I could use the power in my legs to press him backwards, twisting him round so that he fell back heavily against the fridge.

"Holy fuck!" He exclaimed, as I landed on him, passionately working my way down from jaw into the cleft of his collar bone. His pulse bounded beneath my lips, but the bulge between his legs had already told me his blood was up. Good. I thought, smiling to myself. I was having tremendous fun.

His hand slid behind my back, working to unhook the clasp of my bra as I trailed my lips over his skin, the dark, thick hair of his chest brushing my face. He had a salty taste of old exertion mixing with new, and a sweet aftertaste of lingering gunsmoke that I'd never found arousing until that precise moment it was on my tongue.

The pressure around my chest evaporated as he unclasped my bra. I had to let go of him to let him pull it off and fling it away.

"Fuck me, you're gorgeous!" He muttered as he bent his head to trail kisses over my chest and I bit back a squeal when he slid his tongue over my peaking nipple. His hands slid down my back, the hard calluses of his fingertips delicious on my bare skin and then he slid his hands over my backside and lifted me bodily. I had no choice but to grab his thick waist with my legs or risk collapsing backwards until he dropped me on the table and started to fumble with the knot of my dressing gown. It came free and the whole thing slid away as I grabbed at the belt of his trousers, and then there was some awkward tussling as he stripped the rest of his clothes.

I just watched this, keeping my best detached expression on my face as I surveyed his naked form, but truth be told the man was perfection. During his long stint in the colder Scottish climate, he had reverted to type: hard, flat muscles covered in a cold-cheating layer of fat that left his stomach flat and his shoulders thick: a kilt short of a porridge packet cover model. Except that naked, nothing was left to the imagination..

He saw my expression of nervous excitement and rushed at me. I hadn't a moment to draw breath as he worked his way from my lips, to my breast and down between my legs where he applied the same hot vigour he'd displayed before. I dropped back of the table, the blood rushing to my head as it dropped back over the edge and after that, it was pretty fuzzy.

I remembered sensations, like the delicious brush of soft bristle as his head worked between my legs, and how I bit my lip to keep from screaming when his hands and his lips started to work frenziedly so that the powerful headlong dive into my climax was mixed with the taste of blood. He came himself what felt like a few moments later, thrusting himself between my legs, the whole table shuddering with each frenzied jerk until finally he collapsed on top of me, drenched in sweat.


	8. Chapter 8

He pushed himself off me moments later, barely out of breath. I took it the hand he offered, and pulled myself from the table, my naked skin separating from the formica with a painful rasping noise. He rummaged in his trousers, pulled out a squashed pack of cigars and offered it to me. I politely waved my decline. He dropped heavily into one of the chairs, and with a surprising amount of insouciance, as he was still completely naked, he inhaled a deep breath through the cigar and stretched like a tom cat.

MacTavish had the body of man who spend his days in hard toil, in this case for the greater good of Queen and country. Under the soft fat of army food and pub beer lay the thick muscle of physical labour and on his towering height it was magnificent. I counted the tattoos: cheap, blurry regimental insignia on his deltoids, and a piece on his chest that I recognised from a sojourn to the Edinburgh Festival as revivalist clan insignia; although it wasn't executed well and the years hadn't been kind. If I hadn't been familiar with the design, my first guess would have been a hedgehog in a melting donut.

The scent of the cigar hung in our awkward post-coital silence, permeating the room with a sickly sweet odour that wasn't entirely unpleasant. As the puffs of smoke wafted around me, I felt a chill, despite the close, humid air. At my age, I had lost the insecurity about my body that pervaded my early teenage years, but in a strange environment, worried that anyone could knock on the doors, I reached for the modesty of my dressing gown.

"Come on." He said, with his best pleading expression "I've waited years to see this."

I'm ashamed so say that his flattery moved me and I flopped back onto the table, laying on my side, balanced by a flexed leg and propping my head on my elbow. It would have looked marvellously seductive, had I not knocked the salt mill to the floor, and sent the grains scattering over the floor.

"You're a tease." He said, smiling. He was clearly pleased with himself.

His watch beeped, and I frowned. "What time is it?" I asked.

"Half twelve."

"Shit!" I leapt off the table and started grabbing my things.

"What is it?" He asked.

"I'm supposed to be teaching… whatshisname and… the other one in half an hour!"

"Bags of time!" He said, waving his hand dismissively.

"I can't turn up smelling of cigars and your aftershave!"

He had the audacity to look hurt.

"It doesn't exactly look professional." I continued. "What would you have thought of I turned up at your door yesterday stinking of Lynx and looking like I'd rolled in the hay?"

"I'd have been a little offended at your lack of standards, frankly" He drawled, with a snigger, as if imagining the possibility.

"Ha-bloody-ha!" I snapped and sprinted for the bathroom.

He was still where I left him, slouched languidly on his chair, the cigar hanging from his his fingertips, when I reappeared, but he got up when he saw me in the doorway and slid his arm around my waist. He was still naked, with an easy louche self-confidence that I knew was centred around the ample male flesh now dangling at rest between his legs, but already starting to twitch back into battle-readiness as he kissed my neck.

"What are you doing tonight?" He asked.

 _Reading your emails_ … I thought, but I shrugged instead, and said "Working, probably."

He sighed, "Could I tempt you with the finest cuisine of Stranraer?"

"I thought it was meant to be dinner and then sex?" I replied

" _Exactly…_ " He replied, sliding his hand between the front of my dressing gown and between my legs, as he kissed me. My breath caught as his fingertips brushed the damp skin of my inner thigh. _Oh Christ_! I thought _I won't be able walk straight if we do this for six weeks!_ Or at least, that's what the logical part of me thought. The rest of my brain was already salivating at the thought of a replay, and I had to force myself to twist away from his wandering hands.

"Pick me up at seven." I whispered. I grasped him in my hand and he growled, biting my neck, as I squeezed gently. I felt him stiffen in my grip and then I let him go as I wriggled away, delighted at the response.

" _Bitch_." He said. He looked at me with narrowed eyes and a devious smile.

"You don't know the half of it." I winked at him, and slid out the door.

* * *

I made it to my office with minutes to spare, my hair still slightly damp at the edges. Not that it would make much difference in the next hour, between the sun pouring through the frosted glass for the last hour and the locked door, it had evolved from a classroom to a greenhouse. If I hadn't been serendipitously fucking, I would have aired the place out, but I had made my oven and dragged my two students in with me, so we all had to suffer through it; although Riley probably deserved it.

Three minutes after one o'clock, I heard thudding, boot-shod footsteps tramping up the corridor and voices, at least once of which I recognised as the permanently disdainful cockney drawl of Simon Riley, before they wandered in through the open door without knocking.

Ghost: my height, but almost twice my width, moved with the slow, powerful fluidity of a draught horse, a comparison leant weight by his slack, drooping eyelids and placid expression. To the uninitiated, this might have seemed incongruous with his line of work, but I, having grown up in green suburbia, had more than enough experience of horses to know that they _looked_ docile enough, but could kick shit out of you any time they chose. He looked me up and down, and this time, my appearance seemed to satisfy his proletarian tastes enough to pass without comment.

Roach on the other hand, looked like the result of a failed gene-splicing project that had probably involved terriers. His thick brown hair stood out in wild curly tufts, flopping across his forehead, long enough to seem to merge with his eyebrows. Under the ridge of his bushy brows, large hazel eyes peeped out, the light dancing over them as his gaze flickered over the room, from object to object, nothing holding his attention for more than a moment. He was almost a foot shorter and much thinner than his counterpart, but that just meant the same strength was concentrated in a smaller mass, because his excited handshake nearly broke my fingers. He grinned at me, clearly carrying enough vivacious enthusiasm for both of them.

The pair of them, were living proof, I thought, of all the writing on a typical Regiment man: that there was no such thing as a typical Regiment man.

"Dr Wolf?" Roach enquired, in a broad Northern accent that I placed somewhere in Yorkshire. "Is that right? Dr Wolf?"

Behind him, Ghost snorted derisively at the formality, pulled out a chair and slumped into it as if he'd stepped into a unique area of abnormally high gravity. He brought up one thick leg, flexed at the knee and used it to lever himself backwards, swinging on the back two legs of the chair like a schoolboy.

"You can call me Stacey." I replied, with a smile, because it was impossible not to. His friendly energy was contagious. It's… Roach?" I stumbled over the word, awkwardly and tried not to think about its backstory.

"Everyone calls me Roach. It's fine. It's fine." He waved away my awkwardness, still grinning. He had let go of my hand, and now he clapped his hands together and rubbed them. "What's this caper about then?" he asked.

"Have you not already been briefed?" I gave Ghost a sidelong glance, and got pair of languidly raised eyebrows in response, as if this was above his pay grade and therefore, beneath his attention.

Roach shrugged. "I just do what I'm told, me."

"Right." I said. "Do you know _any_ Russian?" I asked.

Roach shrugged again and then shook his head.

"That's okay, we'll start at the beginning." I replied, hoping that I sounded more reassuring than I felt. I indicated he should take a seat.

"The prison control system is, by definition, fixed in scope, and was developed back in 1995. It's never, as far as we're aware, been updated. There are a limited number of menu options. If you memorise all of the words you need and practise, you should be fine."

I pulled a thick, ancient binder across the table and opened it to show them. Inside, printed onto papers of cream A4, each watermarked with declarations of its level of secrecy, was the control system manual.

"This is copy of the original systems documentation" I explained.

Roach seemed to be vibrating. He jiggled his crossed leg beneath the table and his fingers spun a bolt between them, screwing and unscrewing the nut across the threads as I spoke.

Ghost reached across and spun it round to face him, sighing. He leafed through the pages of dense Cyrillic text, squinting at parts.

"We have to learn all of that?" said Roach, incredulously, leaning over with interest.

"No." I answered. "Just the bit that relates to the database of prisoners, and, if you can manage it, the way that the doors can be remotely unlocked, because that will make moving around a lot easier."

"You've got an English version though?" said Roach. He continued to smile, but his eyes had moved from excitement into the wide-eyed expression of anxiety..

I shook my head. "It's all in Cyrillic."

"I thought we were learning Russian?" said Roach, puzzled

"Cyrillic _is_ Russian." interjected Ghost. It's what's they call the alphabet."

His tone surprised me, because from what I knew of Riley, he enjoyed making other people feel awkward, or annoyed. I expected him to verbally lay into Roach for demonstrating his ignorance, but instead, he turned his cool gaze towards him and smiled a little.

"It's all right. We can get through it." he continued.

I saw his hand twitch, as if he wanted to reach out and touch Roach to reassure him, but he stopped himself and formed his fingers into a tight fist before letting go, turning back to me as the moment of tension flowed out of him.

"How do you know all this?" said Roach, who hadn't noticed.

"Trade secrets." I replied, trying not to stare at Ghost.

In truth, we'd managed to get the plans for the prison twice. The FSIN had installed several public terminals in the lobby of their HQ in 2007, as part of embracing the technological revolution and cut staffing costs by allowing visitor applications directly. About a month after they had been installed, technically-savvy friends of an incarcerated dissident had discovered the machines were logged in with administrator privileges. Over the following three months, they stole the entire contents of the FSIN servers, and set up additional accounts for remote access, which they used as leverage to claim asylum in London. Last time I checked, they were running a very successful tea shop in Camden with the fruits of their labours.

Meanwhile, in 2010, a jail spetsnaz with a gambling problem managed to avoid losing a kidney to the local mafia: the Americans paid off the debt exchange for information on FSIN sites until their contact topped himself out of guilt two years later, which was where this particular copy came from. Gupta hadn't seen the need to inform Shepherd about our version if it meant getting a free cover story for us about our own knowledge.

Ghost and Roach didn't need to know this, but I felt a bit guilty keeping the former to myself, because I suspect that Ghost might have had a bit of a laugh at it. It had certainly given me a warm feeling inside when I'd seen the report.

I had learnt Russian by virtue of being an exiled native speaker, but I had double-hatted in an instructor role in SIS for a number of years on-and-off when I wanted a bit of extra pay, usually around the time Mulberry put out their autumn/winter collection, so I had some limited experience of teaching the language to the uninitiated, and they'd sent me to doze through a few courses in adult educational theory when the training budget needed used up.

None of this really prepared me for Roach, who had the attention span of a goldfish and an insatiable interest in _everything_. In between his left-field questions about life, the environment around us, the style of Cyrillic on his worksheet, he moved incessantly. I watched the bolt and nut attach and detach at least a hundred times in an hour. Pens were chewed, unscrewed and taken to pieces before being rebuilt again and again and again. He _never_ stopped moving.

After ninety minutes my nerves were fried trying to keep him focussed, but Ghost was surprisingly patient with him, taking the time to encourage him along and bringing him back to focus on the task when his attention wandered. Twice I watched him check himself when he wanted to reach out, but on the third time when how to say "My name is Gary" in Russian had fallen out of his brain fifteen minutes after I had patiently shoved it in, I suspected his nerves were as shot as mine were, and he laid his hand on Roach's forearm as he told him, it was okay.

He regarded Roach with an expression that was almost tender and that's when the pieces started fell into place. I recalled my entry into the base, remembered that I'd been within kissing distance of him and he hadn't even glanced down my shirt. He hadn't even been holding himself back from doing it, as if it didn't matter. Now I knew why.

Roach, entirely oblivious, grinned sheepishly at me and unscrewed the pen again.


	9. Chapter 9

**Chapter 8: The Discovery**

My students dismissed, I considered my lot: MacTavish had certainly put the effort into fucking, because I had to stretch my sore muscles when I finally stood. I made a mental note not to preface my exertions with a long run next time, and walked stiffly back to my rooms.

Rather that twiddle my thumbs until our next tete-a-tete, I set myself down to work on top of an old army blanket in one of the spare rooms of the flat, set up as a secret office for my real mission. The device I'd slotted into MacTavish's computer allowed me to create a virtual machine, a version of his laptop from two hours ago, so I could look at the same cluttered desktop, obscuring a scantily clad glamour model with gravity-defying cleavage he looked at every time he booted it up.

I covered the basics with internet history first: porn, football, more football, news local to his home town and emails to his family. All banal, quotidian minutiae; although I did take some delight in noting the preferences for the porn had changed in the last 48 hours to be exclusively centered on athletic blondes, with a thread of soft S&M running through it: a bit of light bondage, woman on top sort of thing. I mentally jotted down some ideas for later. Not my usual style, really and to be honest, I resent being sexually involved with the top end of the Army's fitness scale, if I had to do all the hard work.

After fifteen minutes of familiarising myself with the pleasant minutiae of his family's correspondence as sort of palate cleanser, and getting quite involved in the saga of his sister's wedding, I had almost given up finding anything incriminating, when I clicked on a nondescript, standard folder marked "Budget" and the familiar onion logo of Tor's anonymising browser appeared on the screen.

 _Hold the fucking phone._

MacTavish, and in fact any of the persons on the base, had legitimate uses for anonymisation software: perhaps they didn't trust the army to keep them secure during online shopping, or wanted to know if their knob really should look like that normally and maybe some just wanted to keep their super dodgy porn habit to themselves… but there was nothing actually illegal about using an anonymisation service, so why keep it hidden?

This seriously concerned me. I shoved back from the machine, the pleasant feeling from a few moments before evaporating completely. I could do nothing more until the keylogger activated, but then a thought struck me and I pulled the processor logs from the previous boot. It took me a few moments, but I found it: MacTavish had opened Tor, and then a spreadsheet shortly after.

After a few false starts, the columns of names and numbers clicked into place. At first, given my discovery in his bedside drawer, I thought MacTavish was moving drugs, but when I pulled the latest bulletin on the market, the values didn't add up, which meant he was dealing in something else, something that had increased in frequency in the last two years, coinciding with his transfer to Shepherd's patronage... I had a sneaking feeling that the answer, when we followed him through the rabbit's warren of dark web servers, was going to be guns.

 _Shit_.

On the plus side, this almost proved MacTavish's loyalty: why sell guns for what amounted to a pittance compared to what he could command if he sold special operations secrets to the enemy, but it was a massive security breach, a point of potential blackmail, nevermind a big signal of exploitable moral corruption. I had the grave misfortune of knowing where illegally traded guns ended up, and the it was not pleasant. My estimation of him crumbled to dust.

I put my head in my hands. This sort of emotional duplicity was unbearable. I had to be wined and dined by MacTavish whilst knowing two things: that he had the ethical values of a dead whelk, and that I possessed the knowledge to kill his military career. I considered feigning illness, but that was another mammoth acting job I didn't have the capacity for, besides it would only stall his advances temporarily. I would have to face him, and then I would have to use my sexual advance to press him for information, because I could already see the next question on Gupta's lips: what about _Thunderchild_?

"Fucking _Thunderchild_." I said, to the empty room. "Fucking fuckity shit."

 _Thunderchild._

Gupta was fond of saying that you couldn't understand the story of _Thunderchild_ in isolation. It wasn't about the money, really, the money had just been the tip of the iceberg, the pointing spot of the deeper abscess. "In order to understand _Thunderchild_ ," she would say "You have to understand about Charlie Price."

 _Charlie Price._

I had a photo of him in my files, taken in the summer of 2001. Charlie Price. Seventeen, and staring at the camera with the arrogant self-possession I had seen in so many boys of that age, when they were young and beautiful, when they had that body they didn't yet realise was only on loan to them for the next few years at most. He looked positively angelic with his dark curls. A golden boy, the darling of the family, the heartbreaker of the local high school and poised at the end of his adolescence to dive headlong into full adulthood. The resemblance was striking, particularly around the eyes and it actually gave me quite a start.

I read the file. July: the baking heat of English summer just beginning. Long days turning into long evenings with no responsibilities for the next morning. The statements from the coroner's report said that it was common for the children of the village, five in total around Charlie's age, to meet in the woods after dinner and while away the hours drinking cheap cider, smoking and generally pissing their time away. Charlie had arrived on the quad bike, with his girlfriend riding pillion. I had to search the local papers online archive for her picture, but she appeared exactly as I pictured her; a willowy English rose, skin freckled and tanned by the summer sun. Her parents had told the enquiry that they'd forbidden her from riding with him, but I remembered being seventeen and feeling immortal. The temptation had been too much, and she'd paid for it with her life.

Charlie, twice over the limit to drive, had misjudged the track out of the woods, and overturned the quad on a bend. When he lost control, she'd been thrown clear, and snapped her neck when she hit the ground: dying almost instantly. Charlie had been trapped under the machine, the weight of it shattering his ribs and suffocating him. When the paramedics arrived, his drunken, wailing friends had managed to roll it off him, and started mouth-to-mouth. But the damage had already been done: the long compression asphyxiating his brain.

Charlie Price hadn't been present at the coroner's verdict of death misadventure, and no one had mentioned criminal proceedings because by that point, it was obvious he would never recover. The lack of oxygen had killed off his personality, his memories and his ability to perform even the most basic of everyday tasks. Bed-bound and vegetative, Charlie Price had survived.

His mother had coped with this by busying herself in the day-to-day realities of caring for him, steadfast in her resolve to have him home, where she could look after him and her life had become dedicated to making this happen whilst her marriage fell apart around her.

The Russians had picked up John Price twelve months later, two-hundred thousand pounds in debt and climbing, still drunk with grief, eking out his lonely existence. Gupta had been livid when she found out, because financial audits were a regular feature of our existence in the security services, major debts a known weakness for foreign agents to capitalise on. Solvent agents are much less likely to start haemorrhaging information at the flutter of a set of Russian eyelashes.

John Price: the classic example of man who hadn't betrayed his country willingly, but had fallen into a trap he could see no other way out of, and for whom nothing really mattered in life anymore. Obviously easy prey for anyone with my knowledge, but without decent management, in a shitty system that ignored mental health problems until they blew their brains out all over the kitchen, no one saw him sinking into the dark.

I read how he'd first been approached by a man in pub, claiming to represent an arms firm, with the opportunity to earn some additional cash in exchange for insider information. On the surface, this seemed legit, and being industrial espionage, rather than political, the implications failed to trigger warnings in his grief-addled brain until twelve months down the line, when he was dependent on his handlers to stave off the creditors.

Price was stuck between the rock of debt chained to his ankle and the hard place occupied by covert Russian operatives. Although he claimed he didn't know, really, who he was working for, it was obvious by the time we'd sniffed him out that he passed on much more than just who had the buying power and which way the purchasing orders were likely to go. Incentivised by more money for more sensitive information, he'd disclosed operational details concerning special forces activities across the globe.

I watched the video of his interrogation: a haggard, lonely figure slouched opposite a man and a woman, detailing his treachery in flat, sad monotone. It garnered no sympathy with me, nor with anyone at the agency, but Gupta had realised that it wasn't an act, it was the real docility of the truly penitent, and it was ripe for exploitation.

It didn't take a lot of effort to turn Price. He was grateful to avoid piling the shame on his family, his Regiment, his friends. We let the Russians continue to pay his mortgage, and the rest of his debts in exchange for information; although now, we provided the information. John Price became _Thunderchild,_ and as an added bonus, when the Russian civil war heated up, we actually backtracked his contacts to start cutting our own deals, turning Loyalists against their new Ultranationalist masters. It had been quite a profitable arrangement, and Gupta had skyrocketed through the pay-grades for overseeing it.

I flopped back against the wall, noticing for the first time that my tea had gone cold, the room had fallen into shadow and my backside was numb from sitting on the hard floor. I stood up and stretched. I had an hour to get ready and clear my head before I had to push all my moral qualms aside and fuck MacTavish for the sake of Queen and country.

Put like that, it wasn't all bad.


End file.
